YOU Mi

YOU Mi 由宓 (Cologne / Beijing) is a curator, researcher and academic staff at Academy of Media Arts Cologne, where she lectures on global arts with a social-political, transhistorical and transcultural perspective. Her current (artistic) research and curatorial project takes the Silk Road as a figuration for anti-nationalist, de-centralized and nomadic imageries. Under this rubric she is curating a series of performative programs at Asian Culture Center Theater in Gwangju, South Korea in 2016.

For the Curate Archive online residency, she takes a speculative archeological approach and utilizes the online archive to illustrate how multiple times enfold and ingress into each other. In dialogue with writer and artist Sina Seifee, her contribution will be a series of correspondences touching on the matters of nomads, geological desire, technoshamanism, meta-history, among others.

(We all knew that here is the place of ordinary objects, Anahita Norouzi, 2013)

Dear XXX,

Thank you for your letter about the Aja’ib al-makhluqat wa ghara’ib al-mawjudat (marvels of creatures and strange things existing). I did not know of such fantastic writing of cosmographic, ّencyclopedic knowledge from eight centuries ago. I looked into the book, assembled by Iranian-Muslim scientist Muhammad ibn-Mahmoud Hamdani, and found speculatively mapped features of the universe, with everything from minerals to different kinds of jinn, procreation to cohabitation, geographic myths, a History of Nature foreign to the modernist universal contemporary philosophy of science.

I know of a similar book called Shan Hai Jing 山海经 (Classic of Moutains and Seas), a record of mythic geography, peoples and creatures. It is divided into eighteen chapters, each designated to ‘mountain’, ‘sea’, ‘region within the seas’ or ‘great wilderness’ from one of the four directions. In matter-of-factly language, each chapter narrates a certain natural environment populated by creatures at once real and fantastical. You probably know of a ‘Chinese’ bestiary by the name of Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge, but that’s another story. Dating as far back as 4th century BCE, Shan Hai Jing was said to contain knowledge and codes of propriety in accordance with the divine order through which the ancient leaders ruled.

I like how you describe that instead of presenting illustrated cases as exemplary of broader processes, which is the general function of the modern atlas, Aja’ib al- makhluqat brings precise individual instances in their unique story, touching unfolding body-parts of the running rotting flickering evaporating elephant in a poetics of description. Over a thousand years before Aja’ib al- makhluqat, Shan Hai Jing already amounts to an attempt of creating a universal atlas, but the atlas it creates has never separated itself from the realm beyond rational truth.

(‘fang’ and ‘dao’ in jiaguwen, source: zdict.net)

My concern here is, how can one simultaneously demarcate, categorize and parcelize knowledge from being, while at the same time undoing it. The first archivists who compiled Shan Hai Jing were ritual masters of supernatural power and were said to have differentiated the four orientations (in an order of amicability, south, west, north and east, coinciding the order of chapters in Shan Hai Jing). This later gave rise to a governmental functionary called fangshi 方士, or the keeper of geographical and cultural records of the world. Here fang 方 is interesting (shi simply means ‘a person’). In its earliest found form as jiaguwen, or inscription on bones or tortoise shells (up to 11th century BCE), it looks like a knife (dao 刀) leaning on a stand. The earliest form of dao clearly depicts a separation of things into two parts. Whereas in today’s Chinese language, fang generally signals ‘square’, and in its expanded sense, ‘territory’, earlier Chinese lexicon interprets fang as ‘joint’, ‘annex’ or ‘side-by-side’, thus suggesting reconciliation of separation and togetherness – not on the ground of dialectical reciprocity, but of shared root. It is no wonder that instances like Shan Hai Jing, perhaps also Aja’ib al- makhluqat, are contradictory to their ambition of delimiting the world.

(Pigeonhole, Huntinglines, Nader Koochaki, 2014)

This is maybe a bit far-fetched, but I’m thinking about how we deal with binary codes and systemization of everything, which is so much part of our occupation in the archive.

Yours faithfully,

XX

(My First Name Soldier, Mohsen Yazdipour, 2010)

Additional Posts by YOU —

Dear XX

Dearest XX,
Thank you again for your sharing words and passwords, and your ongoing hospitality and training us in herbal literacy, the language of drinking. We are trying different access codes on different portals and examining the partitions and politics that disturb the memory of the ancient t...

You Mi entry 2_Dear XXX

Dear XXX
Sorry for my prolonged silence. I was lost on some highways. Most likely I was struck by the idea of the Alam-e Barzakh you spoke about and ended up somewhere similar. Strangely though it seems to be the theme today (February 29 etc. etc.).
(U-Turn to Utopia, Homayoun Askari Sirizi)
...

You Mi entry 3_Dear XXX

Dear XXX
While you have probably been consumed by your turtle archive, I have taken some time to piece together a collection of astro-physiognomy graphs.
Some of these Mongolian manuscripts on astrology and divination caught my attention. A source explains that the numbers written on the h...

Seifee entry 2_Dear XX

Dear XX,
I must also apologize for my delay in writing back. I was in awe and then in silence moving, in your musical sounds, metallic assembles, above the Tyrrhenian Sea, dowsing...
(Mosque through Persian viewpoint, Neda Saeedi)
Farabi, tried the Greek head on a Baghdadi Fr...

You Mi entry 4 Dear XXX

(Fereydoon Omidi, Non)
Dear XXX,
I’m departing on a trip and will not be writing very often. But I want to share with you the questions that prompt me to travel.
I was asked to think about transfer and Non-transmittability of form. For me ‘form’ is really nothing but the...

Seifee entry 3_Dear XX

Dear XX,
It is indeed sad to hear that you are departing from the strange inscriptive technology of the archive. I am very much looking forward to harvest our link-farm in another time.
But one way or another thought harvests forms that populate our world. I am thinking, any form is the result...